


Homecoming

by dancinguniverse



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: M/M, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 08:44:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6899071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinguniverse/pseuds/dancinguniverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dick shows Nix around back home in Lancaster, but home has variable meaning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homecoming

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [colonelslade](http://colonelslade.tumblr.com/) over on tumblr, who asked for Winnix in the rain in Lancaster and Nix bugging Dick to talk about his childhood and also Nix comforting Dick.
> 
> I've taken some details from the real Winters' life, including the story about sticks. Reality is cuter than fiction.

There’s a creak on the aging wood steps, a heavy tread on the way down, and Dick looks up from his newspaper. Nix steps into the kitchen, hair still damp from his shower. It’s pushing 11 a.m., and he looks around warily. It’s the first morning he’s been allowed to sleep in, and therefore the first morning he hasn’t been dragged from sleep like a rat from its hole. After the last few days where he’s been expected not only to be awake, but conversational and polite before ten, he looks around the empty house like it might be a trap. “Where are your folks?”

Dick shakes and refolds the paper, making room at the heavy round table for Nix to join him. “Out visiting friends for the day.” Nix detours to the counter, lifting the coffee pot with a sloshing, testing motion, and pours himself the last cup.

Their first morning, Edith had cooked a spread, pancakes and eggs and bacon enough to feed all of Easy, and worried over Nix until Dick had been obliged to postpone his own breakfast — and that of the rest of his family — in order to rouse him. It was the same thankless job it ever was, and Nix clung like a burr to his pillow and blanket, grunting about vacation and civilized breakfast hours. Dick’s stomach was growling, and the thought of his family waiting downstairs put an itch between his shoulder blades. He thought about tipping the cot over entirely with Nix still in it, but the resulting crash would have been more embarrassing than his hushed arguments and entreaties.  He had finally herded Nix into the bathroom with an armful of clean clothes and retreated back down the steps, though it was a few more awkward minutes of waiting before Nix had followed him down. The sight of Dick’s parents and sister sitting calmly at the breakfast table with their coffee and orange juice, clearly waiting, seemed to shame Nix into some sense of order. But Dick found this all the more exasperating because there was no way for his family to recognize Nix’s stumbling attempts at polite morning conversation as the herculean effort Dick knew it for.

Yes, he had slept fine. No, the cot wasn’t too small, nor Dick’s room too crowded. They’d been through worse overseas. No, he didn’t know what Dick had planned for the day’s activities.

Edith had urged Nix to sit and had Dick help her with the food. This task he had accepted with good grace, though his shoulders still felt tight, as he strained to hear not just the words Nix returned to Dick’s father, but the tone underlying them. He was primed to step back in if thing seemed to be going downhill.

Nix was listening with a pinched expression to the senior Winters telling him about the rattling sound emanating from somewhere in his Ford’s engine block when his mother pointed Dick toward the cabinet with the coffee mugs. “Why don’t you get Lewis some coffee, dear?”

“I live in his house,” he had balked. “And I promise you he’s never once brought me coffee.”

Nix had protested in the face of combined Winters laughter, a little red in the cheeks, and Edith had softened. “Day One, he’s a guest,” she had compromised. “Day Two he’ll be on his own.”

And so it had gone, the second day closing with Dick and Nix side-by-side at the sink, Dick with his sleeves rolled up against the sudsy water, Nix drying. Nix took the clean and dripping plates and glasses from him with towel-wrapped fingers, and then opened every cabinet in the kitchen searching for their perches. Ann had come back in during the middle of this process and giggled at the gaping cupboards. But Ann, despite being suddenly almost full-grown and sharp in a way that keeps surprising Dick, is easier to bear than his parents. It takes Dick most of the trip to pinpoint that she has changed while his parents have not. Since Dick himself has changed quite a bit since he last lived in this house, he finds this more natural relearning process a relief. Children grow up. He would have had to learn his sister all over again even if he hadn’t been to war.

That night she sat at the kitchen table and pestered Dick with all the mundane questions his parents had asked, but all her own varieties. And Dick told her about the plant’s buildings, so many of them he still gets lost sometimes, and about the diner he and Nix frequent often enough that the waitresses know their names. He started to relax, leaning back against the sink as he let the last of the pans soak for a few minutes. Nix watched them out of the corner of his eye and circled the kitchen, slowly putting it back to order.

“He wrote about you all the time,” she told Nix, who hesitated, trying to take his lead from Dick. “It sounded like you were together a lot.”

“Yeah,” Nix said, and looked like he was trying to come up with something more, but Ann didn’t wait for him.

“Was it really boring? He’s not much fun.”

Dick bit his lip on a smile. Nix looked too surprised to react for a moment, but then his face creased open in a laugh, and he abandoned the last of the dishes, pulling out a chair across from Ann at the table. “Kid, he is so boring, thank you. We win the war — Nazis surrendering left and right — and he’s got our boys out running laps at the crack of dawn instead of celebrating.”

Dick rolled his eyes and restocked the salad bowls Nix had misplaced, but he was smiling.

Now, on the morning of their fourth day, Nix reaches unerringly for his own cream in the refrigerator, and Dick troubles himself only so far as to push the sugar bowl out from under the corner of his paper.

“Dad we could amuse ourselves for the day.” He tips his head at the rain pattering softly against the windows. “Though options are limited.” Dick doesn’t mind the rain though. Any other day of the trip, the prospect of being trapped inside with his family the whole day long would have had him fretting. He’d been in favor of bringing Nix along on this trip, his parents eager to meet the man he’d written so much about during the war, the man who’d given him a job and a place to stay. He’d been looking forward to the time off from work, now that he felt settled in enough to take it.

He’d forgotten how strained Christmas had been, the strange feeling of displacement that he hadn’t shaken until he’d shown up back on Nix’s doorstep in New Jersey. He’d chalked it up to still settling back into life after the war in general. But it’s not easier this time. In some ways, it’s harder.

It’s hard when Nix isn’t in the room, his parents somehow asking all the wrong questions and setting Dick on edge. And Dick had missed them his years in college, in the army, when he’d transitioned from a child to an adult, and he finds himself frustrated at relating to them about even mundane topics.

And it’s hard when Nix is in the room. He finds himself on edge for Nix’s more biting commentary, embarrassed for him and his late-rising habits. Catching Nix’s eye when his parents’ conversation veers into uncertain territory is the same comfort it’s always been, but his parents’ persistent concern about his future in Nixon, how he spends his time, all scratch particularly hard whether Nix is watching him or carefully avoiding his eyes.

Nix hooks a chair with his foot, dragging it out with a scrape to sit down. Aside from the agony of morning interactions, he hasn’t seemed to notice the strain. If anything, he seemed to take the spirit of vacation to heart, and he’s seemed more at ease than Dick had expected, with a smile quicker to the surface than is his usual. “And what options are those? What did young Richard do to amuse himself around here before college and the army interfered?”

Dick shrugs, peering into his own mug and throwing back the last cold swallow. This morning, with Nix safely asleep upstairs while his parents prepared for their day, had been no easier. He knows now that his unease isn’t really about Nix at all. It’s Dick who doesn’t fit here. The house seems to have more breathing room with Ann and his parents gone.

“What does any kid do? I fooled around in the yard. I played make-believe. I liked spending time with my aunt. I played sports.”

Nix laughs. It’s his good laugh, low and genuinely amused, and it pulls an answering smile to Dick’s face in spite of his lingering unease. “I built model yachts,” he counters. Dick waits for more to the joke, and Nix grins even harder.  “Hand to God, Dick, I can probably find a few of them still rattling around a garage somewhere.”

Dick realizes Nix is serious, and laughs as well, mostly at himself for forgetting that Nix is sometimes truly the caricature he likes to flaunt. Then curiosity gets the better of him. “In bottles, or…?”

“No, they floated,” Nix assures him. His grin turns wry. “Most of the time. We raced them. It was a school club thing.”

“Sure,” Dick says, still smiling. “Just a normal school club.”

“Oh, what did you do, farm club? Boy scouts?”

“4H was big,” Dick admits. “Scouts too.” He shrugs, and turns his empty coffee mug in his hands. “I didn’t really go out for clubs when I was younger. Wasn’t big on groups.”

Nix rubs a hand over his face, studying Dick. “So what happened in college? Dick, you joined a fraternity.”

Dick makes a face at himself. “I thought I’d figure out why people liked that kind of thing, maybe make some friends.”

Nix laughs at him, and Dick joins in after a moment, a little exhalation of a chuckle. It was true, though. He’d always been a bit of a loner, and mostly it hadn’t bothered him. He’d had friends, boys he ran around the neighborhood with, played basketball with in the park sometimes. But he’d never been part of the tight trios and pairs some of the boys fell into. He had never quite been sure how those mysteries of gravity came together. It never had, for him.

Dick had thought, starting college, that he should be more of a joiner. The classes certainly hadn’t held his attention, though he’d been a passable student. He had the wrestling team, he had the fraternity house. But even being part of these brotherhoods wasn’t so different. The boys still had their packs, their little subsystems. And despite his official designation within their units, Dick still preferred to be on his own more than not. He joined study groups, but they drifted apart after the test or project finished. He was invited to join tables in the cafeteria, even parties around campus, but his patterns of friendships bloomed and died with each semester and fresh schedule. Basic training had been more of the same. It wasn’t until OCS that he met Nix. It wasn’t until Toccoa he met anyone else worth standing by.

“Wrestling was okay,” Dick defends himself. “It wasn’t Easy, but we had a team, an objective. It’s different when you’re working together for something.”

Nix smirks at him but doesn’t argue. “You ever talk to your Delta Sigma Phi brothers?”

“You remember the strangest details,” Dick points out, but Nix only sips his coffee, waiting for his reponse. “No.” He thinks back to his time there. They were fine boys, just a little young. Dick was sure he had been too, in his own way. He remembers how he had dismissed their raucous drinking, the house parties and endless drunken philosophizing, how impatient he’d been with them all, thought it such a waste of their college time. He’d thought them such a waste of talent, couldn’t see the point of any of their drunken antics or rich snobbery. Now he lets his bare foot rest against Nix’s under the kitchen table. What a hypocrite he’d been.

“We didn’t have a lot in common back then,” he allows. “Hard to build it into a friendship now.”

“Oh, that kind of connection comes in handy,” Nix says absently in the airy way he does sometimes, passing along nuggets of wisdom from his father or some prep school headmaster without lending them endorsement or judgement. Because he’s Nix, and endlessly greedy, he raises on Dick skimming their feet together and takes Dick’s hand in his, brushing Dick’s knuckles with his thumb.

If they were in their own house on a morning like this, rain outside, no work to be done, Nix looking like he does, Dick knows where this might lead. But they’re not home. Dick stands. 

“Come on,” he says lightly. “The rain’s letting up. I’ll walk you down to the drug store.”

“You know how to spoil a guy,” Nix says, but he lets Dick clasp his hand properly and pull him to his feet.

The rain is only somewhat abated, and they walk the mile with rain dripping from the brims of their hats, avoiding puddles where the sidewalk dips and sags in places. The rain is still coming gently down. The whisper of it on the leaves and the endless tapping on Dick’s hat drowns out other sounds. The curtain of water softens the day, rubbing out its definitions.

It could be any other day in Nixon, if the streets were a little busier. The tree-lined roads, the houses that give way to filling stations and corner stores aren’t so different from their neighborhood in New Jersey.

It could just as easily be any scene from Dick’s childhood, Ann stepping at his side instead, Dick clutching nickels for the both of them to spend at the store.

It seems least likely of all that Dick should be here, striding the same path he’d known as a boy, with Nix’s heavy tread a familiar rhythm at his side. He thumps less without his jump boots, though. Some days, Dick even forgets to think of him in his uniform, starts to accept the man in the suit as the real Nix. A year ago they were lounging in the Alps. Two years ago they were shooting Germans and tasting adrenaline with every breath. Three years ago they were sure they would die of heat stroke before they ever made it to Europe.

“What kind of make-believe?” Nix asks, and Dick turns his head, a rivulet of water trickling under his collar.

“What?” he asks, hunching his shoulders against the finger of wet. He heard Nix perfectly well.

“You said you used to play make-believe when you were a kid,” Nix reminds him, and Dick purses his lips.

“Nothing very interesting,” he says.

“Come on.” Nix locks in on this topic immediately. “Tell me.” Dick keeps walking, hands in his pockets. He knows he’s already built it up by hesitating at all, but sometimes the intensity of Nix’s interest makes him clam up out of sheer contrariness. “I’ll get it out of you later, if not now,” Nix promises, and Dick figures that’s probably true.

“I pretended to herd cattle,” he admits. “I’d take a piece of string, tie it around some sticks, and pretend I was leading the herd around the yard.” He expects laughter, and waits. When he doesn’t come, he turns his head, curious.

Nix looks like it’s Christmas Day, delighted and surprised and so embarrassingly soft-eyed under the sharp brim of his hat that Dick has to look away. Nix recovers quickly and closes in on Dick, though they keep making their way down the sidewalk. He clutches the wet arm of Dick’s jacket. “Did you have an imaginary horse too?” From his voice, it might be the most important question he’s ever asked.

“No,” Dick tells him, but he’s moved by Nix’s yearning expression to add, “But I had names for all of them. Stories about which ones were troublemakers, which ones were good stock.” He can’t decide whether he should be smiling or scowling. He can’t say with any honesty that he dislikes being the target of Nix’s attention, but he prefers it when they’re not walking down his childhood street. For now he simply keeps walking, hands in his pockets, his cheeks warm. “You’ll probably hear all of this a dozen more times before we leave. I can’t believe my father hasn’t brought it up already. He thinks it’s the funniest thing that ever happened.”

“Your father and I are about to become good friends,” Nix assures him. Dick doubts this, but doesn’t bother correcting him. Nix has shown a marked wariness around the elder Winters. Possibly he’d expected an older version of Dick, but his father is gregarious and warm, more forward than Dick or his equally quiet mother, yet still a far cry from Stanhope’s loud and immediate rule of any room he enters. Nix has held polite conversation so far, but neither man seems to know quite where to go with the relationship beyond that.

Dick thinks that perhaps he should have brought a few more friends home over the years. His parents make much of Ann’s little troop of girls she brings around sometimes. Dick can’t quite keep them all straight — they were so young when he left — but his parents appear to know not just names, but all of their families and hobbies and interests, and the girls breeze in and out of the house with the confidence of long familiarity.

The drug store has the same red and white painted front, the same bucket of sand parked by the front door to prop it open on warm days. Dick holds the door open and ushers Nix inside. The wooden booths are more worn, but the new scuffs and stains bleed unremarkably into the old. Nix gets a soda, and Dick an ice cream, and they wait out the end of the rain. The kids are all at school, and the place is quiet except for their conversation. Dick doesn’t know the kid behind the counter anymore. His friends have aged out of such jobs, mostly. Nix’s slouch across the booth is more familiar than any of the sites they have toured so far in Lancaster.

Dick is suddenly exhausted by all the myriad details of change. It’s really Dick himself who’s out of place, he knows, and he lets his eyes rest on Nix’s arm draping over the back of the booth, a perfect replica of their usual table at the diner, the one only a few blocks from the plant.

Nix leans forward, waving his hand a bit at Dick. “You still in there?”

“Sure.” Dick finds that his ice cream is melting, and scrapes his spoon against the bowl’s bottom. He doesn’t say, _Just thinking_ , because that will only invite more questions. “Rain’s letting up,” he says instead, and successfully turns Nix’s attention back outside, through the wide windows at the street beyond.

That night, Dick finds himself even quieter than normal. He washes the dishes again, Nix drying, just like they do in Nixon, though it’s his mother’s ancient chipped flatware instead of Nix’s brand new dishes.

Kathy had kept the family china, Nix had informed him more than once. This was one of her many transgressions Dick felt he was supposed to be outraged by, but couldn’t muster up the energy. But Dick eventually came to understand that this non-theft was with Nix’s mother’s permission, and that it is this that stings him, more than the loss of the silver and china itself. Dick likes the sturdy clean white of their replacement dishes, and he doesn’t mind eating on something without so much history behind it.

After dinner and dishes, after sitting with Dick’s parents and letting Ann command the radio for an hour, they retreat up the stairs to bed. His mother had dug the old cot out of the attic, and they’ve been careful to use it, lest anyone open the door unexpectedly to rouse them for breakfast or come looking for the cat, who likes to sneak into closets and wait to be found.

Tonight Dick waits until the household has rotated through the single bathroom to clean their teeth and wash their faces, until Ann’s door and his parents’ door shut up and down the hall, and Dick has closed his own with a small rasp of the latch sliding into place. Nix is sitting on Dick’s bed in his underwear, reading a book he’d brought with him for the trip. He looks up when Dick closes the door and moves as if to take the cot, but Dick waves him down. He lowers himself to the bed and leans against the wall next to Nix, close enough for their bare thighs to press together, nudging close enough that Nix slides his shoulder behind Dick, slinging an arm low around his waist to hold him in place. Dick rests their heads together.

“This is nice,” Nix says after a moment, a question edging his tone.

Dick shrugs, still searching for words to describe the feeling gnawing at him all week. The house was already becoming alien when he came back to visit over college breaks. It had been tiring to explain the classmates and buildings they didn’t know, but it had been easier, then, to slip back into his role as a child. Now he’s a major in the army (except that he’s not that anymore, either), and he’s marched across Europe and done things he can’t explain to his parents, whether it’s shooting another soldier or even just knowing your men, every one of them, by the sound of their footsteps or their breath.

And now there’s another layer on top of that as well, that the home he and Nix have settled into in New Jersey doesn’t translate here either. Their quiet evenings with the radio in their own sitting room don’t easily accommodate Dick’s family or translate to Lancaster. DeEtta, who had faded into the blur of other history Dick had packed up and set away on a shelf of memories, is closer to the surface here, with his parents’ gentle but persistent questions. Dick misses their easy twosome. And he misses the small touches Nix bestows on him whenever they’re alone in their house, which is most of the time they’re not at work.

There is no version of him that feels at ease here, in this place he thought of as home for so long. And it has been exhausting trying to portray a version of himself he outgrew — or worse, some imaginary conglomeration of selves that has never existed at all. 

“I think I’m homesick,” is what he says out loud.

Nix snorts across the top of his head but he presses his lips to Dick’s temple. “Missing the lovely plant already, are we?”

Dick closes his eyes, his hand finding Nix’s by touch and twining their fingers together. “No,” he says. Nix squeezes his hand back after a moment, getting the message. Dick breathes out, and feels the muscles in his shoulders unwind. They’ll go home again the day after tomorrow.

“You wanna lay down?” Nix checks. But laying down will mean moving to separate beds again. It will mean ending a moment Dick doesn’t want to consign yet to sleep.

“In a minute,” he says, keeping his eyes closed, his thumb brushing over Nix’s. Dick’s desk light is still on, a dim glow behind Dick’s eyelids. The house settles around them with hums and groans. The wind picks up again, the neighbor’s windchimes sounding. Dick feels Nix’s lips at his temple once more, and then a page turns in Nix’s book. Outside, the rain starts up again.


End file.
